Weekend in-depth article: Fields of Green for ALL and Myrtle Clarke: Sixteen Years of Refusing to Look Away

In 2010, Myrtle Clarke and Julian “Jules” Stobbs were raided at their home on the outskirts of Johannesburg and arrested for possession and dealing in dagga. They could have paid a fine, pleaded, or gone quiet. Instead they did something rarer. They turned the case around and sued the state.

What followed became known as the Trial of the Plant. The couple, quickly labelled The Dagga Couple by the South African media, set aside careers in film and television and founded Fields of Green for ALL NPC in 2013. Their purpose was straightforward and radical at the same time: to place human rights, evidence and the lived experience of ordinary South Africans at the centre of the cannabis debate, and to refuse the idea that prohibition was either inevitable or just.

Jules died in 2020. Myrtle has continued. Sixteen years after the original arrest she remains out on bail, the remaining plaintiff in a matter that was adjourned and has never been fully concluded. Around her, Fields of Green for ALL has grown into one of the most consistent and principled voices in South African cannabis advocacy — and one of the few with formal standing at the United Nations.

This is not a story of sudden victory. It is a story of endurance, of keeping the human cost of policy visible long after the headlines move on, and of insisting that any future industry must include the people who carried the plant through the decades of criminalisation.

The Beginning: Arrest as Catalyst

The 2010 raid was not unusual in its mechanics. What was unusual was the response. Rather than accept the criminal label, Myrtle and Jules obtained a stay of prosecution in 2011 and launched a constitutional challenge. They named eight government departments as defendants. The onus, they argued, lay with the state to justify the continued prohibition of a plant that communities across Southern Africa had used for centuries for cultural, medicinal, spiritual and practical purposes.

Fields of Green for ALL was created to support that litigation and to do the slower, less glamorous work that court cases alone cannot achieve: public education, community support, documentation of arrests, and the building of a network that could speak with some coherence when government or media asked what “the community” wanted.

From the beginning the organisation’s name carried its ambition. Fields of Green for ALL — not for a narrow class of licence-holders, not only for those with capital or political access, but for all. That principle has remained the through-line even as the legal and political landscape has shifted.

The Trial of the Plant and What Followed

The Trial of the Plant began in the Pretoria High Court in 2017 and was adjourned sine die. In the years that followed, the Constitutional Court delivered its landmark 2018 judgment recognising the right of adults to cultivate and use cannabis in private. Parliament eventually passed the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act. On paper, the country had moved.

On the ground, the picture remained more complicated. Regulations needed to give the new Act full practical effect were slow. Commercial pathways stayed complex and often expensive. Arrests and raids continued. Small and traditional growers still reported uncertainty and economic pressure. Criminal records from the prohibition era continued to shape lives.

Myrtle and Fields of Green for ALL have repeatedly returned to these gaps. In open letters, submissions, public statements and the long-running Hotbox Show, they have argued that private-use rights without accessible commercial and industrial pathways, without meaningful protection from arbitrary enforcement, and without mechanisms to clear old records, leave the promise of reform incomplete.

One of the organisation’s more recent public interventions was an open letter to the Parliamentary Committee on Justice and Constitutional Development requesting an update on the regulations required for the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act. The letter noted that nearly a year had passed since the President signed the law, yet the attendant regulations and public consultations had not materialised. The message was consistent with more than a decade of work: rights on paper are not the same as rights in practice.

Human Rights, Harm Reduction and the Daily Work

Fields of Green for ALL is not only a litigation vehicle. It runs a 24-hour arrest emergency line, offers victim support, produces educational material, and maintains a Green Network of supporters, Dagga Private Clubs and affiliates. The organisation has been explicit that its focus is the harms of prohibition rather than a simple celebration of the plant’s benefits. That framing has allowed it to speak to issues that purely commercial voices sometimes sidestep: the impact of criminal records on employment and family life, the disproportionate effect of enforcement on poorer communities, the need for harm-reduction approaches, and the protection of traditional knowledge and genetics.

Myrtle has also taken the work internationally. Fields of Green for ALL holds special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council — a rare recognition for a cannabis-focused organisation. The group has participated in Commission on Narcotic Drugs side events, contributed to cultural-rights submissions, and worked with networks such as the Cannabis Embassy and FAAAT. In 2025 the organisation publicly supported efforts to have cannabis recognised in discussions around intangible cultural heritage at UNESCO, arguing that Southern African relationships with the plant predate modern prohibition by centuries and deserve formal acknowledgement.

These international engagements are not decorative. They place South African community experience into global policy conversations that are still too often dominated by Global North frameworks and commercial interests.

Myrtle’s Voice: The Rants and the Record

One of the more distinctive features of Fields of Green for ALL’s public presence is Myrtle’s direct, often unfiltered commentary — the “Myrtle’s Rants” series that appears on the organisation’s channels and the Hotbox Show. These are not polished corporate statements. They are updates, frustrations, historical reminders and calls to remain organised.

In mid-2026 she released a reflective piece looking back across sixteen years: what had changed, what had not, and where the Trial of the Plant still sat in the larger unfinished business of reform. Earlier 420 messages and other rants have returned to the same themes — the slow pace of regulation, the continued vulnerability of small growers, the importance of community infrastructure such as private clubs, and the refusal to accept that “it is legal now” when the daily experience of many people says otherwise.

These recordings matter because they keep institutional memory alive. Newer participants in the sector, whether entrepreneurs, policymakers or casual consumers, can encounter a continuous record of advocacy that did not begin with the 2018 judgment and has not ended with the passage of a single Act.

Media

•  Myrtle’s Rant: 16 Years Later… Has Anything Really Changed? (2026)
https://youtu.be/Y0M4zy7IF0k

•  Myrtle’s 420 Rant (2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coJdo1uflpk

•  Official organisation site and founders background
https://fieldsofgreenforall.org.za/
https://fieldsofgreenforall.org.za/founders/

The Larger Context: Rights, Industry and Inclusion

South Africa’s cannabis conversation now contains several overlapping strands. There is the constitutional private-use foundation. There is an emerging industrial and medical track, with hemp fibre projects, licensing processes and export ambitions. There are national dialogues on SMMEs, red tape and policing practice. There are cultural and community platforms, festivals and media projects. And there is the persistent reality of raids, seizures and the economic precarity of many traditional and small-scale growers.

Fields of Green for ALL has positioned itself at the intersection of these strands, repeatedly returning to a simple test: does the emerging system expand meaningful participation, or does it reproduce exclusion under new rules? Myrtle has been clear that an industry built primarily for well-capitalised entrants, while the people who maintained the plant through prohibition remain criminalised or economically sidelined, fails that test.

This stance has sometimes placed the organisation at odds with purely commercial narratives that treat legalisation as largely complete once private use is protected and a licensing regime exists. It has also given the organisation credibility with communities that experience the sharp end of enforcement. The #StopTheCops work and the ongoing support for people still navigating old charges or new arrests are practical expressions of the same principle that drove the original court case.

Continuity After Loss

The death of Jules Stobbs in 2020 was both a personal and organisational loss. Public statements from Fields of Green for ALL continue to acknowledge him. The work did not stop. Myrtle has carried the litigation status, the public voice and the institutional relationships forward, supported by a small volunteer team and a network of donors, clubs and international allies.

That continuity is itself a form of political statement. Prohibition systems rely, in part, on attrition — on people becoming tired, broke, or simply busy with survival. Remaining visible, organised and on the record for sixteen years undercuts that logic.

What Remains Unfinished

As of 2026 the core issues that Fields of Green for ALL has highlighted for more than a decade remain live. Regulations that would give full practical effect to private-use legislation have been slow. Commercial and industrial pathways are still difficult for many ordinary South Africans to enter. Criminal records from the prohibition era have not been comprehensively addressed. Enforcement practices continue to generate community-level friction even as policy documents speak of a green economy.

At the same time, the organisation’s own record shows that sustained, evidence-based, human-rights-centred advocacy can shift the frame of debate. The 2018 Constitutional Court judgment did not emerge from nowhere. Community documentation, litigation, public education and international engagement all played a part in making the continued criminalisation of private adult use increasingly untenable.

The next phase will test whether South Africa can move from partial rights to a system that is coherent, inclusive and grounded in the reality of the people who grow, use and have long relationships with the plant. Fields of Green for ALL and Myrtle Clarke have made clear they intend to remain part of that argument — in court where necessary, in public where possible, and in the daily work of supporting a community that has already waited more than long enough.

For those who want to follow the work directly, the organisation’s site, the Hotbox Show, and Myrtle’s continuing public comments remain the primary sources. The story is not finished. Sixteen years on, the people who started it are still in the room.

Key media and further reading

•  Myrtle’s Rant – 16 Years Later (video, 2026): https://youtu.be/Y0M4zy7IF0k

•  Myrtle’s 420 Rant (video, 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coJdo1uflpk

•  Fields of Green for ALL official site: https://fieldsofgreenforall.org.za/

•  Founders page: https://fieldsofgreenforall.org.za/founders/

•  High Times feature interviewing Myrtle Clarke: https://hightimes.com/activism/getting-on-with-it-cannabis-in-south-africa/